Unity theme prevails during Missouri Synod gathering

ST. LOUIS — The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod closed its convention in downtown St. Louis Thursday with the more than 1,000 delegates sticking to the event’s unofficial theme of unity.

That theme was stressed early in the weeklong event at America’s Center, when the president of the denomination’s New England District, the Rev. Timothy Yeadon, spoke about a “tough year” in his region. The year included Hurricane Sandy, the Sandy Hook school massacre and the bombing at the Boston Marathon.

In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, the president of the synod, the Rev. Matthew Harrison, asked the pastor of a Lutheran church in Newtown, Conn. — in Yeadon’s district — to apologize for participating in an interfaith prayer vigil.

The synod’s constitution prohibits members from taking part in worship services that blend the beliefs and practices of Lutherans with those of other faiths and Christian denominations, but Harrison’s request upset some church members.

Nevertheless, “Satan has failed to divide us from one another,” Yeadon told delegates Sunday. “We will never be divided from Jesus and we will never be divided from each other.”

Two weeks before the convention, Harrison, 51, won a second three-year term.

Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod conventions are held every three years, and serve as the 2.3 million-member denomination’s principal legislative assembly.

The synod, which was organized in 1847, is the second-largest Lutheran denomination in the country, after the more liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that is twice as large.

About 160,000 LCMS members reside in the St. Louis area.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis, by comparison, has about 500,000 members.

Among the other business conducted this week by the delegates — who include ordained pastors and lay church members — was a vote to expand its relationship with Lutheran church bodies in Liberia, Siberia and Togo.

The body also passed a resolution that “encouraged” the church’s regional leaders to oversee and supervise their congregation’s administration of holy communion so that “practices which are not in harmony with the Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions be addressed fraternally and evangelically.”

With the 500th anniversary of the Reformation four years away, the delegates passed a resolution asking for church-wide support for its Wittenberg Project. In 2006, the synod bought a 16th century school building in Wittenberg, Germany, just down the street from where Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses, a moment historians have traditionally pegged as the beginning of the Reformation.

Synod leaders believe only around 2 percent to 4 percent of Germans in the Wittenberg area attend church, and the LCMS is renovating the school building to be used as a center for Christian education and evangelism.

Much of the liveliest debate at this week’s convention revolved around theological education. The delegates approved more centralized oversight of distance-based theological education programs offered by the church’s two seminaries, in St. Louis and in Fort Wayne, Ind.

After much discussion they also approved a plan to require previous approval of seminary faculty by a centralized three-person committee after the candidate undergoes “a thorough theological review,” in effect removing that authority from seminary leaders.